Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible

by John H. Walton

All of these references offer a procreative theogony, but no ontology. An Akkadian prayer from the Seleucid period names a list of gods that Ea creates, and with each one a function is given. This does not go as far as suggesting that the designation of a function is necessary for a god to exist, but it indicates the importance of the assigned function in the understanding of the nature of the god. The most helpful statements for discerning the Mesopotamian ideas of divine origins and ontology are found in the Atrahasis Epic and Enuma Elish. The opening line of Atrahasis establishes the setting as “When gods were men.”21 This is an interesting case of the nature of the gods being defined by their functions. Here their function was “humanlike.”